Conclusion

The conclusion situates key discursive elements of Schuonian Perennialism within a genealogy of German idealism leading back to Kant to show metaphorical resonances with a Kantian metaphysics of autonomy and its attendant universalism. In contradistinction to Ibn ‘Arabi’s heteronomous absolutism, this chapter tracks how Frithjof Schuon’s religious essentialism functionally echoes the discursive practices that mark Kant’s “universal” religion as defined against Semitic heteronomy. While both Kantian and Schuonian universalist cosmologies thus appear to reflect a similar Copernican turn where an autonomous, universal perspective forms the essence of all religion, this chapter argues that these respective discourses also metaphysically reflect the imperial cartography of the Copernican age itself and its attendant ideological conceit of a universal perspective. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the overlapping discursive formations of Kantian and Schuonian universalism conceal absolutist modalities of supersessionism that are ironically similar to those openly posited by Ibn ‘Arabi.